Last night a founding member of the popular YouTube channel The Creatures was the victim of swatting, and the entire incident was caught on his live stream. Jordan "Kootra" Mathewson was playing Counter-Strike on a live-stream when a SWAT team showed up and took him to the floor of his office at gunpoint.

"Uh oh, this isn't good," Kootra said during the live stream. "They're clearing rooms - what in the world? I think we're getting swatted."

Littleton, Colorado SWAT team members stormed the room shortly thereafter, and ordered Kootra to get onto the floor with his hands behind his back.

Police were responding to an anonymous 9-11 call from someone claiming to be an "active gunman," according to local news station 7 News Denver.

"The caller claimed to have shot two co-workers, held others hostage, and threatened to shoot them. He stated that if the officers entered he would shoot them as well," a police spokesperson tell the news station.

"There were no victims or any evidence that a shooting had taken place. If the investigation determines that today's incident was a hoax, those involved will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

You can watch the dramatic events as they unfold in the video to your left. Neither Kootra nor other members of The Creatures team have responded publicly about this incident yet.

Comments

Am I the only one who found it disturbing that once the police discovered they were being recorded they immediately moved the camera so it could not see them?

I can also picture how this could have gone a lot worse. If he had headphones on (and thus did not respond quickly enough), or if he had been surprised and done some sudden movement, or if he had been black.. or autistic....

It's not just you, and it's becoming disturbingly frequent too. From lacking any video footage of situations due to whatever reason (like the Ferguson, MS stuff) to cops pretty much ripping a cell phone out of your hands because they claim it's a felony to record them... It's been happening an awful lot lately, and the courts have told them repeatedly that they're in the wrong to no avail it seems.

It's only a matter of time before one of these "pranks" get somebody killed. I know in one case over ten thousand dollars in damage were done to the streamer's house and neighboring houses, and in most states police are expressly protected from lawsuits or prosecution for this.

Alternately, I'm waiting for a streamer in Michigan to get swatted, since our supreme court decided the 5th amendment doesn't protect you against seizure unless you're actually charged with a crime, and most people who are victims of mistaken police raids here end up losing their cars, TVs, and computers with no way to get them back.

Sadly swatting is not just getting used on streamers, it has become a general purpose 'prank' to use on people you do not like. I can recall there was a security researcher who has been swatted something like half a dozen times alone for instance.

While I have not heard of any cases connected to swatting specifically, there have been instances of police raiding the wrong house and shooting the owners before, and even cases of police coming to a house at the owners request, killing them because they thought the owner was an intruder and they did not stop to actually make sure before firing.

So yeah, it is only a mater of time till someone gets hurt or killed due to these pranks.

And when they're raiding a web streamer like this, there's things that make it worse. Headphones make them unlikely to respond to officers initially, and many use symbols, slogans, or "code talk" (i.e. gamer jargon with no meaning outside of the gaming context), which police frequently use to identify gangs (this, too, has caused false alarms - just look at the whole fraternity sign thing in Ferguson).

You've got gun sounds (enough itself to have gotten some gamers visited by police), and then ones like this, with a special area set up just for the streaming, often have promotional materials around. I can't find the article, but I think it was last year a developer got raided by a swat team because a cardboard cutout or statue of a video game character with a gun was mistaken for an active shooter.

Unrelated: I'm a little disturbed by the fact that the Littleton police were still talking about the Creatures guy as a "suspect" on the news clips being posted about this on youtube, when by any reasonable definition he is nothing more or less than the victim.

What Hevach is referring to is Civil Asset Forfeiture. In this, the property, not the person who owns the property, is accused of being involved in a crime and is seized by police. The person who owns the property then has to go to trial to prove that their property was not involved ina crime.

This is legalized theft. It is the law in almost all states in the US.

My county tried (and failed) to recall its sheriff over a related situation. It's a long and stupid story, but to make it short: A man's $60,000 custom muscle car was stolen and recovered, but rather than being returned was commissioned as a police car.

In most cases, you can usually get a car back (almost always torn apart for a search), but most other property there's a very good chance you'll just get an itemized list showing it was all damaged or destroyed.